


blame it on the tequila

by iris_ophelia



Category: Veep (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 09:20:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14281818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iris_ophelia/pseuds/iris_ophelia
Summary: She felt Dan’s hand grip her hip and his mouth press closely next to her ear, “Going somewhere Ms. Brookheimer?”An alternative scenario to season four.





	blame it on the tequila

Fucking tequila. Fucking Sidney. Fucking Dan. Fucking asshole oil companies. Fucking New York.

Really, she had not planned to end up in Dan’s bed. Well, not just in New York, but ever again.

In fact, when Sidney told them that they were going to New York for three days to work with one of his biggest oil clients, Amy was looking forward to collapsing in a comfortable hotel bed every night at 8pm, ordering expensive room service on Sidney’s dollar, and watching Downton Abbey.

Working for Sidney the past four weeks had been the easiest job she had held since she was a fresh-faced college graduate that moved to DC. She was good at lobbying in all the ways Dan was horrible, but his conniving personality enabled them to be a great team. She was shocked how incompetent the majority of Sidney’s staff seemed to be, or at least, unconnected. She and Dan shined brightly as a team at the firm, and she seemed to be able to do no wrong which was something she had not experienced in years.

As her eyes fluttered open, she found herself laying on her side facing away from Dan. She felt his body pressed close to hers, but he was definitely not cuddling her (thank god). She laid still, debating if she could move slowly and quietly enough that he wouldn’t feel or hear her. As she slowly started to slide towards the edge of the bed, she felt Dan’s hand grip her hip and his mouth press closely next to her ear, “Going somewhere Ms. Brookheimer?”

Amy groaned and closed her eyes because the light from outside the window was painful from the tequila. “Oh god, please fuck off,” she strained as she stuffed her face into the pillow. He chuckled in her ear and didn’t release the firm grip he had on her hip.

“I think last night you were saying ‘fuck me,’ not ‘fuck off,’” he murmured.

She elbowed him and eventually turned over to see him smirking widely, “Seriously, I will kill you. What did you do, drug my shots?”

“You did enough damage yourself and I only want to fuck women who are conscious enough to remember.”

“Well, mission failed,” she said narrowing her eyes at him.

“Right, you don’t remember **anything** from last night?” he asked rolling his eyes with a sarcastic tone.

She just groaned in annoyance, because he was right, of course she remembered, and stuffed her face in her hands. “What time is it anyway? We have a meeting with that idiot’s father at 9am? How the fuck is that idiot the VP of the company?”

She opened her eyes to look at Dan, “Nepotism?” he suggested with a grin.

“Never have I agreed with you more.”

Dan rolled over to grab his phone while Amy scanned the room to find her underwear scattered on the opposite end, along with the dress she had been wearing. She was debating if she was brave enough to just roll out of bed naked, to prove that she was confident, that the night before meant nothing and that he meant nothing, when she felt him pull her back towards him. “Want to fuck quickly?” he smirked wiggling his eyebrows.

“Not a fucking chance. This cunt is closed for business and I’m sure you’ll find some other blonde to fuck in twelve hours anyway,” she said pushing him away and getting out of bed so she could quickly get dressed.

“Alright pumpkin,” he said sarcastically, “Suit yourself. I’ll see in the lobby in an hour.”

She didn’t look back as she gave him the finger and rushed out the door.

***

As the water cascaded down her body, she kept asking herself how the fuck she could have let herself sleep with him after all these years. He was a snake. An attractive and unabashedly smart snake, but still, a snake. She convinced herself she must have been experiencing a weird form of Stockholm Syndrome since Dan, the person she had prided herself most on disliking (other than Jonah) for years, had somehow become a weird savior for her in the last few weeks since she had stormed out of Selina’s hotel suite at the convention.

Trying to make her hair perfect and putting the finishing touches on her makeup, she knew that she had to pull herself together, because no matter how hungover she may have felt (from both the tequila and sex), she and Dan could not fuck up this oil account if they did not want to be personally hunted and murdered by Sidney.

Sliding on her black sheath dress, the one that was extremely professional yet hugged her curves in all the right places, she pushed the night before out of her head to run over the strategy she and Dan had been discussing for the past week to impress the president of the oil company. She felt confident as she walked into the lobby that they could do this, and saw Dan sitting in one of the plush chairs scrolling through his iPad.

“Ready?” she asked as she approached.

He looked up from his iPad and did a once over her body and gave her an approving smirk with her dress choice, but then handed her a coffee, so she decided she couldn’t be too pissed because it was a large Americano and tasted like heaven. “Don’t have an orgasm or anything in the middle of the lobby,” he whispered into her ear.

She punched him in the arm, “You really do ruin every possible nice thing you do for other people, you know that?”

“Yup, let’s go, our Uber is waiting.”

To his credit, Dan did not say another innuendo or dick remark the entire ride, but instead allowed her to talk through her thoughts on their strategy. She knew he was an ass, but she also knew that he would never compromise the meeting they were going to just because they were stupid and fucked the night before.

After waiting for ten minutes by the receptionist, the vice president of the company (aka the President’s son who was the biggest thirty-year-old douchebag Amy had ever met and started the drunken shenanigans the night before), named Josh, appeared with a grin on his face. “Dan! Amy! You guys being alive this morning proves you can handle this account.”

And while she wasn’t often thankful for Dan, in that moment, she was because he could handle the idiot bro language and she could not handle her disgust. “Of course man,” Dan replied shaking his hand, “Hope you put in a good word for me and Ames with your old man.”

“Of course, of course! Come on back.”

Josh introduced them to his father, John, and left them to fend for themselves. And while Josh was everything Amy dreamed about in her worst nightmares, his father was the exact opposite. Clearly a seasoned businessman who understood the DC political sphere, Amy and Dan were able to have a productive conversation, and by the end, they had him agree to 95% of their strategy plan which was more than enough to please Sidney. He poured them all a scotch at 10am to toast the continued partnership between his company and Sidney’s firm, and they all agreed to meet back in DC with Sidney when John was there the following month for business.

In the Uber on the ride back to the hotel, they both let out their pure joy.

“Fuck yes, why is this so easy?” Amy asked.

“Because while we still work for a raging lunatic, we work for one who doesn’t give a fuck what we do as long as we make him money.”

Amy nodded her head in agreement and shut her eyes as she slouched against the seat. “I cannot wait to go back to my hotel room and do nothing all day,” she murmured.

She felt Dan’s hand start to stroke her thigh, and her eyes quickly popped open to stare at it. She looked up but saw he wasn’t looking at her, but rather staring at his phone in his other hand while the hand on her thigh began to creep further and further up, almost past the point of no return, until she quickly stopped it. He looked up from his phone and grinned at her, “What?”

She rolled her eyes and they pulled up to the hotel.

When they got to their floor, she felt him behind her as she dug for her keycard, and she turned around to see him looking down at her. “And what do you think you’re doing?” she asked. She was trying not to sound nervous, but it was difficult not to breathe shallowly as he boxed her in against the door.

He grabbed the keycard out of her hand and pressed his forehead to hers, opening the door behind her, “I thought that was pretty obvious.” He ushered her through the door, shut it and pushed her up against it, pressing his lips firmly against hers, sliding his tongue in her mouth. She wrapped her legs around him as he pushed her harder into the door with his pelvis, and slide his lips down her neck.

“This is the last time,” she panted.

“Right,” he said dryly, biting down softly on her ear.

And then he fucked her on her bed, and she wanted to hate it, but couldn’t, because despite being the biggest dick and asshole in the universe, Dan certainly knew how to fuck her in all the ways Ed did not for a year.

Afterwards, as they laid out in post-coital bliss, she crawled out of bed and slid on her underwear and a Penn t-shirt from her suitcase and locked herself in the bathroom for a few minutes. She looked completely freshly fucked, her normally perfect hair in disarray and her makeup a bit smudged. She washed her face and pulled her hair back into a messy bun, and took a moment to breathe, knowing Dan was probably in process of sneaking out.

She walked out of the bathroom five minutes later and saw him lying in bed with his boxers on scrolling through his phone. She hid her surprise well, or so she thought, until he looked up at her and smirked, “What?”

“Nothing, I just didn’t know you were so sentimental Dan, to wait for me before you ran out of here to attack your next victim tonight.”

He gave her the finger and went back to scrolling through his phone, showing no signs that he was planning to leave. She grabbed her own phone and saw news alerts going off indicating Tom James was leaving Selina’s ticket due to “unforeseen family matters,” which Amy knew meant Selina had officially gone batshit crazy and there was no one to reign her in.

“Holy fucking shit!” she exclaimed.

“I know; Selina is going to be more toxic that a nuclear plant. Thank god I got fired and you did your mass exodus.”

But, despite everything, Amy felt a weird tug deep inside of herself that made her want to run back to DC and be there for Selina. She knew it was irrational and crazy, but she had worked most of her adult life to make Selina president, or rather, elected as president, and this was a clear sign that was never going to happen.

She felt Dan tug playfully on her bun and she looked over at him. “Don’t,” he said looking at her squarely.

“What do you mean ‘don’t?’” she asked.

“I mean do not fucking go there. This is not your problem. Ames, she is fucking nuts, and no matter how hard you killed yourself working for her, she was never going to be President beyond this term.”

“Fuck you,” she said rolling on her side, feeling oddly overemotional and willing herself not to cry until Dan become uncomfortable enough to leave. The tension in the room was apparent, but instead, she felt Dan just gently stroke his fingers up and down her side as she laid away from him and he did not say another word and he continued to scroll through his phone.

She let a few tears dribble on the pillow, but was not obvious enough that Dan could hear or see them. And then she shut her eyes and drifted to sleep.

***

When she awoke later, she was confused to hear C-SPAN droning on in the background. She saw the clock on the hotel side table blinking 3:00pm and rolled over to see Dan sitting up in the bed with his laptop in a t-shirt and boxers.

“Hi, sleeping beauty.”

“What are you still doing here?” she asked.

“You have a better window view than I do.” He went back to typing on his computer and she stared at the TV for a few minutes that had some boring and unimportant committee session playing. She rolled out of bed to grab her leggings and her own laptop, and while she was utterly weirded out by Dan’s suspicious kindness, she decided to play along so they could finalize their report for Sidney. Before starting to review the report Dan had started, she grabbed her phone and saw a bunch of texts from Ben, Mike and Gary and took a deep breath.

“I already talked to Ben,” Dan said seeing her body tense.

“What did he say?”

“He said you should ignore whatever Gary and Mike were texting you, and keep him in mind for when you get another Chief of Staff job with someone,” Dan grinned at her.

“You are the biggest dick.”

“I know.”

However, she took Ben’s advice and ignored the texts. She and Dan strategized and bounced ideas off each other of how to formulate the final report to send to Sidney. They ordered Thai food to the hotel and worked for hours, and laughed at stupid news reports once they turned the channel to CNN, and got angry about other reports. It felt very domestic, but that day, Amy didn’t hate it.

And then in a Thai food induced coma, and after their final report was sent to Sidney, Amy let Dan fuck her again because she really did not want to think anymore about anything, and he was really good at fucking her. And then they fell asleep, and she wondered before she drifted off if this was all made up in her head and she was going to wake up in DC, still as Selina’s campaign manager.

She did not wake up in DC.

She did, however, wake up to Dan kissing her neck and moving his hand into her underwear and fucking her with his fingers. And then, pulling her on top of him to grind down and fuck him.

And she expected it to be weird after, but it wasn’t because as they laid in bed with her head resting on his chest, him stroking her back gently with his arm around her, he said that he was going to pack quickly and he would meet her in the lobby in an hour for the airport. He got out of bed and threw on his clothes, but before leaving her room, leaned down to give her a soft kiss.

So maybe it was weird because Dan did not give soft kisses or hang out all day and night when he had been fucked.

They parted ways at the DC airport, with a wink from him getting into a separate Uber to go back to his apartment. Amy resolved that it was magical tequila in New York that created a dystopian situation where she and Dan seemed like a couple for twenty-four hours, and now that they were back in the hell of DC, everything would be business as usual.

On the ride back to her apartment, Ben called her.

“Hi Ames, how is everything going?”

“Not too bad, just secured Sidney a fuck ton of money from one of his top oil clients, so pretty excited to know I’m going into work tomorrow and going to receive praise, not my ass handed to me. Or maybe I’m petrified, because that’s such an unfamiliar feeling.”

Ben laughed, “Yeah, well, I can’t say I’ll be that lucky.” He paused for a moment, “Ames, I need you to meet with Selina tomorrow.”

Amy stiffened in the seat of the car, “Why?”

“Because she’s not listening to me or Kent, and she needs you to tell her that she has to put Furlong on the ticket for appearances so that when we get slaughtered in November, it won’t be as horrible as the alternative scenario of putting some idiot freshman Congressman, like she wants to.”

“Ben, she’s not my fucking probably anymore.”

“I know, but you need to do this for the party because if you don’t, we’re fucked across the board in November. I mean we are anyway, but it’s going to be unconceivably bad if Furlong isn’t on the ticket. And when you get bored of lobbying, because you will, I’m really just preventing a bigger mess for you to clean up.”

She took a deep breath, “Fine. I can meet with her after 7.”

“Good, come to the campaign offices at 7:30.”

She hung up the phone and slammed her head against the back seat. Why the fuck was she the default problem-solver of everything?

***

Her Monday morning and afternoon went better than most of her Mondays had for thirty-four years. Sidney was beyond ecstatic about their final negotiation deal in New York and insisted on bringing them to lunch, and Dan played footsy with her under the table and gave her secret glances, and she felt wanted and appreciated and did not know if she actually felt comfortable with a small notion of happiness.

As the day ended and people filtered out of work, she went to scan some reports and saw Dan talking up one of the new executive assistants at the firm. She looked away quickly, and as she waited for the document to scan, she scolded herself for ever thinking anything but the worst of him and reminding herself that just because they fucked, it meant nothing. Her phone buzzed with texts from Ben confirming the meeting at 7:30 and she sauntered back to her office, resolving to be the power bitch she was so proud of for many years and forgetting of ever having thoughts of personal happiness outside of work. Her personal happiness came from her career, not from stupid things like relationships, sex, or rainbows and butterflies.

As she packed up her stuff to meet with Selina, Dan appeared in her doorway. “Drink?” he grinned.

“That’s ok, I think Mandy out there can take care of any of your drink needs,” she said while continuing to pack.

“Jealous?” he asked with glee in his voice.

“That would be your wet dream, wouldn’t it? Me, jealous, over brainless Barbie out there wanting to fuck you. I hate to break it to you Dan, but I don’t give a shit who you fuck and what harem of women you have waiting for you in DC because I have somewhere to be.”

“What, do you have a date?” he asked curious.

“None of your fucking business.” She looked at him and he was trying to read her, “Can you please move, I really need to be somewhere.”

Dan looked like he wanted to say something, but instead moved to the side so she could walk by him. She did not even give him a second glance.

***

Amy dragged herself out of the car towards her apartment. It was almost 11pm and she was beyond exhausted after first sitting with Selina, and then with both Ben and Selina to help them strategize the best tactic to bring in Furlong. As she approached the steps, she saw Dan sitting there reading a copy of _The Wall Street Journal_.

She plopped next to him, “Stalking me?”

He set the journal down, “Something like that.”

There was a minute of silence. “Dan, what do you want from me? I have no fight left in me today.”

“So I’m guessing you didn’t just get fucked then?”

“Unlike some people, when I screw someone for twenty-four hours the day before, I don’t usually fancy fucking a new person the next day.”

“Where were you then? I know you weren’t meeting with a client.”

She took a deep breath and stood up, “I need a drink. Do you want a drink?”

He followed her wordlessly inside and she opened a bottle of wine, pouring two very fully glasses, sliding one across the kitchen island to him and taking a big chug of out of her own glass. He left the glass in front of himself and waited for her to talk.

“Ben called me yesterday. So I went to see Selina.”

He nodded his head unsurprised, “And?”

“I had to convince her to make Furlong her running mate for the good of the party.”

“There it is.” he grabbed the glass of wine and took a sip. “Why?”

“Because as Ben put it, I’m going to get bored of lobbying and the party will be a mess if I don’t make an attempt to save it.”

Again he nodded and then she sat next to him at the kitchen island in silence as they both drank their wine. “I didn’t fuck that girl.”

“Well, bravo to you.”

“Amy…” he started.

“Dan, you don’t need to explain yourself. I get it, we fucked, it was convenient and we were in the magical land of New York. I promise, I have no notion that you are my knight in shining armor and ready to make a proper woman out of me unlike the rest of the female population of DC.”

He drank more wine, “What if I wanted that?”

“Wanted what?”

“To make a proper woman out of you?”

Barely resisting spitting her wine across the kitchen, she choked and he slapped her back, “What the **fuck** are you talking about?”

“I just mean the thought of not having you…” he stopped trying to compose his thoughts, “When you eventually leave Sidney’s firm, I can’t fathom not seeing you every day. And that you’ll find some idiot guy in DC who will never…” and he trailed off.

She looked at him, still not comprehending what he was saying, “So what, you want me so no one else can have me?”

“Yes.”

She snorted, “How fucking romantic Dan. Glad to feel so wanted.”

She got up to refill her wine glass, but he tugged her back in-between his legs and looked at her seriously. “I mean that even the things I don’t like about you, I do like about you. I like when you’re shrill and angry and yelling at someone because you’re the most powerful woman in the room. I like when you make faces in the back of the room when people make stupid remarks and you don’t think anyone notices. I like that at the end of the day when you’re exhausted and sick of trying to keep your hair perfect, you pull it back in that clip so your neck is exposed.” He cupped her face and felt her nervously shaking, “I just mean, it’s you. And I don’t want to fuck anyone else because they’re not you.”

She took a deep breath, “Where is all of this coming from? I mean, I just don’t understand. You’re Dan. Your dream scenario is getting fucked by ever female aide as they simultaneously tell you all of the vital information you need and want about their bosses.”

He smiled at her, “I know, shocked the fuck out of me too.”

She managed to smile at him, “You know I still hate you, right?”

He laughed, “Yes.”

“And that I’m still going to continue to kick fucking ass and be the best lobbyist in Sidney’s firm? And then when I leave, run the most kickass campaign for someone and win and be the best. And you’re going to be my side bitch?”

He continued to smile at her, “I don’t know that I would have it any other way.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck, “I might fuck you tonight, but don’t expect some sort of domestic goddess to appear just because we’re going to screw more frequently.”

He kissed her and whispered, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

**Author's Note:**

> That's all folks! Maybe, still don't know, there may be a part two coming, but also pretty happy with the ending for these not-so-lovebirds too.


End file.
